The iLimb is the most advanced bionic hand currently available, with five individually powered, multi-articulating fingers controlled by electrodes that are placed on the surface of the skin and are designed to pick up muscle signal, Karen Hakenson, a communications representative from Touch Bionics, told us. However, because it was designed to work with human nerves, all of this functionality initially was useless on the Bionic Man, she said. "The hand was designed to take a nerve signal from the human body, but of course we didn't have a nerve signal," she said. "We had to build electronics to fake a nerve so the hand could respond to the signal it was expecting."

Not all the parts on the Bionic Man were from manufacturers, however. Some, like the robot's shoulders, had to be custom built to suit the design goals of the robot. Shadow Robot undertook this challenge itself, constructing a shoulder out of aluminum, a type of plastic called delrin, and a series of 3D-printed parts. "We needed movement in the shoulder for reaching out and grasping something, and there wasn't a prosthetic shoulder that could move," Walker said.

The SynCardia Total Artificial Heart was used as the heart for the Bionic Man, pumping blood from each ventricle through the robot’s artificial circulatory system at 2.5 gallons per minute. The heart -- which is typically used as a temporary replacement heart for people awaiting heart-transplant surgeries, and then removed once a viable donor human heart is found -- is capable of all of the functions of a normal human heart. The company currently is working to certify the heart as a permanent replacement organ. (Source: SynCardia Systems)

To enable this movement once the shoulder was built, the Bionic Man's designers used a pneumatic muscle running on compressed air to mimic a body muscle, giving the shoulder the range it needed to move backward and forward, Walker said. Another part that needed to be custom built was the robot's circulatory system for moving the fake blood that pumped from the heart.

Walker said he and his team realized this was expertise they didn't have and was a task better left up to a medical expert. They brought in Dr. Alex Seifalian from University College London, who had a more working knowledge of a human body's circulatory system than the robot makers, to build the part of the robot that would pump blood from the heart to its organs. Seifalian, professor of nanotechnology and regenerative medicine, constructed the system with a mixture of plastic piping and artificial blood vessels, Walker said. The completion of the circulatory system gave the Bionic Man the lifeblood and the real-life animation perspective the robot didn't quite have before. "When [Seifalian] filled it with artificial blood and turned the heart on, it was a pretty spooky moment," Walker said.

Almost human
Indeed, all of this construction has left the Bionic Man with some uncanny human-like features. It can walk unaided on its prosthetic legs and talk using a triptych of technologies -- sophisticated chat bot called Eugene Goostman from Princeton Artificial Intelligence, speech recognition software, and a text-to-speech generator of the same ilk as the one used by Steven Hawking, according to Pope.

Because of the speech-recognition technology, the Bionic Man can have conversations with people, using the same colorful language humans sometimes use. "He was sometimes a bit rude and a bit sweary," Pope said. This is likely because the person programming the robot used colorful language in its conversations with the robot, which learned to speak through a combination of both custom programming and also mimicking other people, he said.

Thanks to advanced retinal prostheses from Second Sight and his custom-built shoulder, the Bionic Man could also locate and pick up objects, and even pour a drink, Pope said. In the end, Shadow Robot's Walker concluded that about two thirds of a human body can currently be replaced by the medical industry. "A lot of this technology is really surprisingly impressive," he said. "It has come a long way in the last 10 or 20 years."

An infographic on the website of the Smithsonian Channel shows the various artificial parts of the robot and describes their functions.

Thanks, etmax, you stated my question more clearly than I did :) It was based on the previous, failed attempts at interfacing biological elements (nerves, muscles, etc) to electronic ones due to chemical poisoning from metals. In medical materials R&D, there's been a ton of work to identify materials that can be implanted, but most of those are plastics. Titanium is the exception, but as you point out, it's used to bond with bone, not nerves.

Also, AnandY, thank you for the compliment on the story! (I forgot to say that in my previous comment.) It was a great deal of fun to write and research. I found it fascinating and am glad you did, too.

Hi, AnandY. I can answer the artificial heart question at least. It was connected to an artificial circulatory system that did indeed pump blood throughout the robot to show how it can be done. So while it didn't matter to the robot's "life" per se, it did show how it could be done artificially.

@Elizabeth, this is a great piece but one that leaves me with so many questions (a few of which am hoping someone here will answer). For starters, I know the artificial heart can't pump blood into the robot so what is it really doing there? Or is the robot just meant to be a stand on which to hang all the prosthetics and artificial body parts has been able to create without necessarily having these parts communicate or work together. And, any ideas about the artificial intelligence, however minor, included in the whole piece?

This is impressive, not because the team was able to collect all the prosthetic and artificial limbs that are already functionally being used in different parts of the world but because the team was actually able to make these parts actually work together as they would in a human body. More importantly, it provides a clear blue print of what needs to be done now in order to come up with a complete and functional bionic man.

etmax, yes, the degree of non-thinking that we see is probably going toleadto a really big disaster in the future. With the cop-out phrase of "I didn't know", which is one excuse that I don't accept any more. My reply is that when does not know, one must find out, or do something else.

@William K and @etmax, thanks for the update. Seems that nerve cells are much more sensitive than bone cells (would higher bio-electricity levels through nerves be one of the critical factors that causes this characteristic?)

WilliamK, I read an article about 6 years ago where some researchers were studying E.Coli and why it was so fragile outside the body and decideded it was due to dehydration so they transplanted some genes from an extremophile and had E.Coli that could survive anywhere. To me that was total lunacy, if it ever got out of the lab it would be a disaster.

I know they say that can't happen but we have a high security biolab nearby that does research into various pathogens to create vaccines and treatments and they were working on some chicken flu. To cut a long story short there was an accident and worker worker got infected with a non-lethal (to humans) version and was sent home and that weekend she visited family who have a large chicken farm. Nothing happened but it was so close to going awry. People are simply fallable and as a result shouldn't be allowed to do certain things.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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